Tech notes.
Infrastructure, pricing, and the engineering decisions that quietly set a company's ceiling.
Home Assistant went from 69,000 installs to 660,000. The board it runs on went from $120 to $305.
Operators who can now write their own software need somewhere to run it that they own, and the demand is measurable. So is the obstacle: the same AI buildout that made the software nearly free is bidding against them for the memory to run it. Raspberry Pi's price increase works out to exactly $5 per gigabyte.
Kalshi bans athletes from trading their own games. Nobody has written the rule for a company that can make it rain.
Every prediction market bars the people who can move the outcome. That rule has always worked because influence left a record. A funded weather-modification industry breaks the assumption — not because seeding is powerful, but because its effect is invisible at exactly the resolution a contract settles at. You cannot prove you made it rain. You also cannot prove you didn't.
Humane raised $230M and shipped 10,000 units. A $600K Indiegogo is still selling e-paper phones.
The AI hardware that tried to replace your software is dead. The hardware that reshapes software you already run is a business. What changed isn't the silicon — the software layer went free, so the only thing left to sell is a physical decision about what the device will not do.
Marketing automation without enterprise pricing
You don't need HubSpot, Marketo, or a six-figure annual contract to automate your marketing. Here's how we build a full stack priced around what each client actually uses.